Doris Cross

Santa Fe artist Doris Cross (1907/8-1994) was born in New York City in 1907 or 1908 to Russian immigrants. Her family isn’t entirely sure how or when her interest in producing visual art developed, but by the 1930s, Cross was working as a supervisor for the Works Progress Administration’s mural division. In 1939, she married and had two children, but continued to pursue her art career. By painting commissioned portraits and teaching painting classes in the basement of her Brooklyn home, she helped support her young family.

Living in New York City afforded Cross many opportunities to see the latest in the art world and meet some of the best-known artists of the period. From 1944 to 1947, she studied with German-born artist Hans Hofmann, who is considered by many to be the “Father of Abstract Expressionism” because of his influence on Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Hofmann’s use of brilliant colors, his fondness for big physical gestures in the painting process, and ideas regarding the push and pull of various tensions on the canvas were an inspiration to Cross, who painted primarily in his style for the next 20 years. Then, in 1965, she had her most life-changing artistic breakthrough.

“I was dusting books, and I had several old dictionaries around. I opened one and for no reason that I know, I saw the whole thing as one. Certain words just came out and they worked. I very quickly grabbed a pen and wrote down the words that just came out and they worked together. I crossed out what I didn’t want, left what I did want on the dictionary column. This was not a conscious experience; I felt excited, later a little frightened. I wondered if I was getting grandiose ideas. When that happened, I stopped. I didn’t look at the dictionary for months. I thought I was having a schizophrenic experience.”

What Cross had done by altering that dictionary was produce a type of visual poetry, which has since been termed Erasure art, wherein the removal of words from a page and a focus on others leaves the remaining text with a wholly different meaning. Cross was the first practitioner of this new genre in the United States. Her breakthrough predates several contemporary artists, like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, who found success in the early 1980s by combining language and fine art, and the new wave of 21st century Erasure poets inspired by the redacted documents of the 9/11 era.

https://www.rdrnews.com/2020/08/03/from-the-vault-doris-cross/